Might be. We've been talking family history. So far we've figured out that Stalas's father doesn't sound like an alt of mine, but we're not sure about our mothers because he never met his.

It seems very unlikely for exact family history to be strictly required for althood, considering how far everyone's ancestry goes back if they have such a thing at all.

There's bound to be some correlation, though. Parents are important.

Except when they aren't. I'd still very much like to meet more of me.

Maybe if you hang around long enough, you'll find some more. Or maybe it's Miles Day today.

I do plan to spend a while in here. Accumulating books. Although not all of them are available in digitized format, let alone pen-compatible format, so I'm doing some hand-scanning.

Anything interesting?

I'm trying to collect a corpus of illustrated texts to study from when we no longer have translation magic to talk to Stalas with. Everything looks like English here, but Bar says if I take it home it will look like its original language.

Bizarre. I don't suppose there's a way you can take two scans of the same book and have one stay translated.

No, which is why I'm separately recording what it looks like to me here in addition to taking scans. But it's a bit tedious.

At some point Vivienne Vorville's partygoers are going to wonder what kind of family emergency we can possibly be having in her bedroom.

True. And it would probably be unfair to turn 'family emergency' into, say, 'bomb threat'.

I am willing to buy the house, I'm just not sure how to do it with a minimum of fuss while someone holds the door.

Probably difficult. Possibly prohibitively so.

A bit. And many of the same complications also arise if we keep holding the door to allow, say, Simon, transit time.

Yes. Although Simon could be here pretty damn fast, depending what I told him. He could even claim he was there to badger me about something, and not terrify anyone too badly.

Maybe we should send Ivan downstairs to propose that the party reconvene elsewhere so we can have more freedom of movement. I can pay the cover charge for the lot of them at someplace appealing or something.

That might work.

"Uh - some people were talking about going to the art show, but I don't know if I can get them to do it anytime soon, or if I can get all of them to. And Vivienne might not want me to keep having my family emergency in her parents' house after the party's moved."

"Why, who else were you planning to bring trooping in here?" inquires Mark.

"I would like to retain permanent access to this door and be able to march anybody in and out at will, but most proximately, possibly Simon Illyan. In the context of him being able to remember the translations of books that are not in English, but I suppose his presence would have other ramifications for you unless you want to tell him to stop having you followed yourself."

"I could do that, sure."

Ivan might or might not be able to usher the party guests to an art show within a relevant time frame, and probably we'd be unwelcome to remain after such a move. And earlier Mark mentioned that he wanted Simon told to stop having him followed and he has a very peculiar look on his face in reaction to the idea that if Simon were here he could pass on this message directly; I'm not at all sure it's a good idea to have Simon in while Mark is still here.